Lead DevOps

About the Role

Pelico runs as an elegant set of ~20 microservices that deploy on a single VM — and scale to Kubernetes for the enterprise. As we grow in the US, our most important deployments are also our hardest: aerospace and defense customers who run Pelico on their own air-gapped, on-premise infrastructure — where their IT team operates the product and we have no access to the cluster, the logs, or the data.

You'll own that frontier. You'll lead a small DevOps team (≈3–5) and own how Pelico is packaged, deployed, and operated in environments we can't see — so a customer's IT team can stand it up, run it, diagnose it, and recover it on their own, while we still hit every commitment we make.

Over the next 12–18 months you'll drive two co-primary tracks: the on-prem deployment frontier — tooling and packaging that get Pelico's current and committed enterprise customers live and self-operable, repeatably, not bespoke — and a federal posture, standing up GovCloud / FedRAMP (controls as code) so Pelico can serve federal and defense customers on certified infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Make it operable without us. Design the observability and self-remediation story for air-gapped, customer-run environments — shipped diagnostics, remediation playbooks, health checks, alert auto-classification.
• Package it for any environment. Build the Helm charts, Compose stacks, and Terraform/IaC for Pelico's real deployment variants — on-prem single-VM, air-gapped Kubernetes, and private-cloud (GKE/GKS, EKS, AKS) — deployable by customer IT with clean runbooks.
• Deliver on the commitment. Turn an enterprise deliverable — "ship a GKS Helm chart in a month, with three people" — into a roadmap with weekly checkpoints, MVP scope, and a date you hit.
• Make it repeatable — and federal-ready. Turn bespoke deployments into repeatable tooling that gets current and committed customers live without heroics — and stand up Pelico's federal posture (GovCloud / FedRAMP, controls as code), now a co-primary track and the most probable near-term direction.
• Set the boundary. Sit with customer IT and security months ahead, agree the RACI and SLAs, and draw an unambiguous line between what's theirs and what's ours.
• Lead by doing. Stay hands-on (you'll choose ~20–50% infra work), set the bar, grow your engineers, and bring AI tooling into the team the right way.

Requirements

• A track record operating enterprise software in environments you didn't fully control — customer-owned / on-prem / air-gapped — or equivalent depth standing up regulated / government-cloud (GovCloud / FedRAMP) environments (deep experience in either counts; the other is a fast ramp).
• Deep, current hands-on Kubernetes + Helm + Terraform/IaC and Docker/Compose; managed Kubernetes (GKE/EKS/AKS) and on-prem/bare-metal.
• Observability you can ship into places you can't reach — Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk; designing diagnostics and remediation for customer self-operation.
• A record of owning committed enterprise deliverables end-to-end with customer IT — RACI, SLAs, checkpoints, scope — and hitting the dates.
• Leading by example — you set the bar by doing; ideally you've managed ~3+ engineers, or you're an exceptional hands-on tech lead ready to build and run a small team.
• Comfort treating security & operability as infrastructure — you've operated in regulated, customer-owned, or on-prem environments and design for auditability and self-service.

Nice to Have

• GovCloud and/or FedRAMP experience (strongly preferred / expected) — AWS GovCloud / Azure Government / GCP Assured Workloads, or having taken a system through FedRAMP (Moderate/High), IL, or CMMC authorization.
• Aerospace / defense / government / regulated on-prem experience; air-gap or ITAR/EAR exposure.
• A real self-service / platform-engineering philosophy (golden paths, self-remediation).
• AI-native ways of working — scoped tasks, heavy context, retained ownership.
• Secrets management, backup/DR, upgrade/migration tooling for disconnected sites; Fargate/ECS.

Benefits

• A real ownership mandate over Pelico's hardest, highest-stakes deployments, with equity in a category-defining scale-up.
• Deep, high-leverage problems with real enterprise customers — and the autonomy to solve them your way.
• An AI-native engineering culture and a small, elite team — be challenged, learn, and have fun.
• A foothold in Pelico's growing US presence, an international team of 40+ nationalities, and a real commitment to fair pay and equal opportunity.